On Love, Charity and Our Relationships with the Order of Things
I would like to share a story, told by the West-African scholar Amadou Hampate Ba (1901-1991), about an experience he had in the home of his teacher Tierno Bokar (1875-1939):
“The Bird Fallen from Its Nest”
The love that Tierno Bokar had for human beings went far beyond the confines of his religious group; it spread over the whole of the human race. It even went beyond this to embrace all of creation, to the most humble of God’s creatures.
One day in that year of 1933 which I spent with him, he was sitting in the small room where he was to die seven years later. Addressing the eldest of his students, he was elaborating on [an important religious ritual]. We were all spellbound. Outside, the wind was blowing. It made the sand rise up and was ruffling the feathers of the rooster who was clinging to a pillar. A stronger gust shook the structure. At the shock of this, a swallow’s nest, which had been balanced on top of the wall under the awning of the roof, opened up. A chick fell out, chirping. We gave it an indifferent look. The attention of those listening to Tierno did not slack for an instant. Tierno finished his sentence, then was silent. He sat up, passed a sad look over his students, and then extended his long fine fingers towards the small bird.
“Give me this other one’s son.”
He took it into his cupped hands. His look became brighter.
“Praise to God, whose anticipatory grace embraces all beings!” he said.
Then he put the little bird down, got up, took a box, and put it under the nest. He went out and soon came back. Between his fingers we saw a large needle and a cotton thread. He climbed up into the box, put the little swallow at the bottom of the torn nest and repaired it with the same care that he used to use when repairing boubous (shawl). Then he got down again and took his place on the matting. We were waiting impatiently for the continuation of the lesson, but instead of taking up his rosary again, which was serving as the basis for his explanation, he left it alone. After a moment of silence, he spoke to us:
‘It is necessary that I speak to you again about Charity, because I am pained to see that not one of you has enough of this real goodness of heart. And yet, what grace!... if you had a charitable heart, it would have been impossible for you to listen to this lesson, even about God, when a small miserable creature was crying out to you for help. You were not moved by this desperation, your hearts did not hear this call…
Well, my friends, in truth, he who learns by heart all the theologies of all the religions, if he does not have charity in his heart, he can consider his knowledge to be like so much worthless baggage. No one will rejoice in the encounter with the divine if he does not have charity in his heart. Without it, the five prayers are but insignificant gestures; without charity, the pilgrimage is a worthless pleasure trip.’
The scene on that day is etched indelibly on my memory. I can still see him, dressed in his white garment, delicately repairing the home of this ‘other one’s son’ whose call we did not answer, so preoccupied we were with ourselves.
In a general way, he taught us never to kill an animal without necessity, even a simple mosquito. For him, all of nature, animals and plants included, should be respected because they are not only our nourishing Mother, but they are, moreover, the great divine Book wherein everything is a living symbol and a source of teaching.”1
Love
At the center of a Quranic vision is a way of living rooted primarily in the very human possibility of opening ourselves up to others—to other persons, to the natural order, to God. This is an openness which constitutes the experience of love, and a Quranic vision ought be built upon a deep and abiding love because, as Chittick says, “[love] is so central to the overall ethos of the religion that if any single word can sum up Islamic spirituality—by which I mean the heart of the Qur’anic message—it should surely be love.”2 The Quran is God’s loving message to His most beloved creation, and a call to mankind to participate in this infinite circle of love, its matter and its methods. Furthermore, love permeates the cosmos, given that its things move by love. Love is not just the good feeling that one person may have for another. It is love that drives all things towards their engagement with what is outside of themselves: be it for nutritional purposes, procreational purposes, sympathetic purposes, and so forth. God’s love for His creation is expressed by and through the love that all things experience in their growth, in their interactions, in their changes and acquisitions. This love can, of course, be conscious or unconscious; it can be discerned in emotion, in instinct, in the natural function of a sun-flower turning toward the sun. But each instance of love is analogous with the other: love is fundamentally the “tendency to go outside of oneself to participate in another being.”3 Participation is the key. Our love for the created order of things must start with the profound recognition that we are, as created beings, embedded within this created order. We are ontologically dependent upon it, and our actions swim within its existential waters. The created order is our home, even if this home is temporary, and the quality most appropriate to home is that of love. Love is at the center of a theology of embeddedness.
Love is a force which draws us outside of the confines of our own internal circles of thought and concerns. When considering our human relationship with the created order, we are asked to think beyond ourselves: to approach this order with arms outstretched, minds silenced, and souls in reverence.
Charity
At the center of love is the charity which Tierno Bokar regarded so highly. Charity tranlates the Arabic (ṣadaqa), a word that is etymologically related to something I discussed in my first post, the “saying yes” or the “affirmation of the truth of something” (taṣdīq) which is the bedrock of imān. Thus, any Quranic vision ought to include a real engagement with the activity that is ṣadaqa. Ṣadaqa is the giving we do as a response to the gift of life we have been given, a gift of life considered in its fullness.
Allow me a sociological generalization: the character of our ṣadaqa is in fact a good measure of the character of our relationship with the created order. For many of us, ṣadaqa is a mindless and hurried act, almost a reflex—abstracted from any real and tangible relationship with the recipient of our ṣadaqa. From the comforts of our mosques and our homes, a few buttons clicked, a few dollars stuffed into the box, and we have fulfilled our duty of giving, through the mediation of some organization we know nothing about, to those suffering half-way across the world. We do not witness the consequences of our giving, we feel no real existential concern for the recipients, however, we do feel good knowing we have done our part in making the world ‘a better place.’ And yet, the suffering continues, the nature of the suffering does not change. This is not to say that by changing our methods of ṣadaqa we could somehow eliminate suffering from this world: this world will always involve suffering. Nor is it to say that there is no value in giving charity to organizations which are truly working to mitigate the suffering of people around the world. But by restricting the idea of ṣadaqa to an abstract financial transaction, one that places no real demand on our being and on the nature of our relationships, we are blinding ourselves both to the reality of ṣadaqa as well as the reality of the suffering which we are striving to absolve. We are not truly giving in the sense of giving something of ourselves (and not just our ‘property’) in participation with the other. The other, the recipients of our ṣadaqa, remain at a remove from our daily experiences, and the space offered by that remove is enough to negate any true connection, any true recognition that we are in fact embedded within the same created order as they.
The abstract character of the relation between the giver and the recipient of charity is analogous to the abstract character which often colors our relationship with the created order of things.
Corruption has occurred within the land and the sea: due to what the hand’s of man have wrought. This is so man can experience some of what he has done, so that perhaps he may return. Quran 30:41
At this point, I will focus on our relationship with the natural order, specifically. As always, these thoughts are preliminary. And, again as always, I advice myself first and foremost before expressing something which I have come to understand is of the utmost importance.
One of the primary causes of a severed relationship between man and nature—and I am here using the word “relationship” quite loosely—is the mistaken notion that we, as human beings, are somehow separate from the order of nature, at a remove from its inner workings in a manner well-expressed by the term ‘the environment.’ The environment, defined as “the totality of the natural world, often excluding humans,” may be, as something which ‘surrounds and encompasses,’ an ever present aspect of our lives, but it remains something “out there,” something other than the urban and the even rural. The ‘environment’ is an abstraction, devoid of any real content because of the vagaries of its vastness. As Wendell Berry put it:
“The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as “the environment” —what surrounds us. Once we see our place, our part of the world, as surrounding us, we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves. We have already given up the understanding—dropped it our of our language and so out of our thought—that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that we and our land are part of one another; so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so we cannot possibly flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and neither can be better than the other.”4
Nature is juxtaposed with artifact, with the ‘human’ order, and by this becomes little more than a source of goods and resources at worse, or else a place of beautiful scenery at best: a destination to be admired, through the ubiquitous lenses of our phones, before we return to ‘the real world’ of business and of life. So, just as our ‘care’ for the recipients of our charity extends very minimally beyond our own established patterns and comforts, our ‘care’ for the natural involves very little demand on our being. We adapt our care to a constructed model of the good life, rather than vice versa: a little less water in the garden, some energy saving light bulbs, an electric vehicle rather than gas—and we smile to ourselves as we record the lessening numbers of our carbon footprint. Again, this is not to say that these factors do not help, but only to remind ourselves that this help is deeply restricted to the symptoms of the ecological crises rather than the most important underlying cause. The suffering (this time the suffering of the natural order) continues, and the nature of the suffering does not change, because we ourselves have not changed. We have not changed the ways that we see the world thereby changing the ways that we act within it. The tongue is the translator of the heart, the old Arabic saying goes, and similarly, our actions are the translators of our own internal dispositions. Alternatively, when we care for the natural order, when we act—as we were created to act—as stewards— we are, at a fundamental level, affirming the truth of the recipient of our care as a being created in dignity and with a true place within the created order of things. By saying “yes” to the creature we are saying “yes” to the Creator. And the opposite holds as well. Legitimate change, movement in act, action in motion, is predicated upon internal reflection, aided and facilitated by the will of God. And, of course, we ought to get our hands and feet in the mud.
I ask: how do we envision or imagine our relationship with the created order? What are the metaphors we abide by which engender this vision?
Ba, Amadour Hampate, A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar. Translated by Fatima Jane Casewit. World Wisdom, Inc, 2008. 139-9.
Chittick, William C. Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God. New Haven, Conn. Yale University Press, 2013. xi.
Lachterman, David R. Max Scheler: Selected Philosophical Essays. Evanston, Il. Northwest University Press, 1973. xxxviii.
Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Berkeley, CA. Counterpoint Press, 2015. 24.